Commercial Property : Sea Semester

Thursday 22 November 2012

Sea Semester

Giora graduated from Amherst College with a chemistry major, but was lured to the Earth sciences with the prospects of using the submersible Alvin to study hydrothermal vents. He received his master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Washington in chemical oceanography studying the connections between biology, geology, and chemistry at deep-sea hot vents. While deep-sea vents and upper-ocean plastics seem like very different research topics, they both require an interdisciplinary approach to understand the system as a whole. Giora has spent more than one year of his life in the middle of the ocean, five days of his life on the seafloor, and several months in the centers of the gyres in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. He has worked as a scientist and educator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Sea Education Association, and is currently at the University of Washington School of Oceanography. He splits his research efforts between open-ocean plastics, deep-sea vents, and building a fiber-optic cabled observatory in the northeast Pacific.